Booked for the Super Bowl

ATLANTA — Happy Super Bowl Sunday. I will have fallen asleep reading before the game is decided.

Thanks to all the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood, I've given up spectator sports and turned my attention to books. I made the decision, in fact, thanks to three particular books: one I've read, one I'm reading and one I will set fire to if I'm ever in the same room with it.

Now, I'm going to bumble, fumble and stumble over myself to quickly reassure the dozens of people close to me who make their living in the sports industrial complex: this is not a judgement. I'm simply done with allowing my happiness to be left to the actions of unknown athletes.

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I've replaced ESPN, MLB and NFL with NYRB, LRB and TLS. Whole hog. And you know what? Life feels better.

Becoming a sports scrooge isn't a minor move. This goes back to my teenage years, when I'd squeak the answers to radio trivia questions. Despite my voice, I was coldly confident: I'd found the Sporting News NBA yearbook the hosts were using for their questions. Later, my sage boss, and considerable Yankee fan, conferred on me what he called the best title in journalism: Sports Editor. I stepped into a newsroom vacuum where editors who heard "Met" thought of the Museum or Opera before Mike Piazza.

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It was first light of a golden New York sports age. Everyone, even the Knicks and Nets, won. After cheering for hopeless teams in Texas, I had allowed myself a significant spectator sport concession (hold your nose) to become a Yankee fan. I rationalized for existential experience: I wanted to know what it felt like to back a team that adhered to the Powell Doctrine. This was the year before ticker tape annually fell in the fall. My non — phoof! — fan status was cemented on a Tuesday in mid-May when I sat in an upper deck section with only Sterling and Kaye and watched Dr. K become Dr. No.

Beyond that game, the memories I savor have nothing to do with the feats on the field and more about the setting and the company. A favorite memory is crossing the emptied pathways of Augusta National in the Saturday gloaming, happy to be walk beside a friend but knowing we'd both rather share the magical stillness under the pines, dogwoods and azaleas with our fathers or our too-young sons.

Of course, I'll never be able to forget what it felt like to watch Zidane plugging his crown into Materazzi's chest in Berlin. It was the biggest event on the planet and my brother was in the stands with me at the end of long Weltmeistershaft.

As fatherhood loomed, I began to pare my interests from EVERYTHING remotely classified as a sport to three teams: The San Antonio Spurs and my Texas Longhorns' football and basketball teams. They were respectable and they won.

My obsession took a modern turn as I started to delve deeper into the coverage of University of Texas fan sites. Then it went wrong. Just as the Yankees spoilt it for me by signing A-Rod, Texas took a sad tumble when Mack Brown (or Will Muschamp) didn't coach RG III or Johnny Heisman after Colt McCoy's shoulder went bust in the Rose Bowl. I was hooked and I tried to see a way out of disappointing Texas seasons by paying attention to recruiting.

The fickle whims of teenage boys filled more than an hour a day. I furtively followed in the early hours of the morning and during naptime. Then came news of a possible felony before the day before the Alamo Bowl. Trying to emerge from the orange-tinged pit of negativity, I picked up Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, a Dallas writer.

The novel lays bare the hypocrisy of our attentions by following a young soldier and his comrades, days from being returned to Iraq, through the Dallas Cowboys locker room and equipment depot. The irony hits like a bad sport cliché. With the aging Texas Stadium as a backdrop, I can only imagine how Fountain would've handled sending his war heroes under the 600-ton jumbotron that Jerry Jones hung from atop the collosseum that replaced it.

The book pushed me to get ahead of what was coming. On the eve of Tebow-mania, friends and I hatched the Super-Genius Football Club plan. On Sundays we'd give our wives some quiet and take the kids. The gentlemen would congregate to watch Red Zone (a program that offers NFL omniscience as it cuts from one game to another) and the kids would fend for their littleselves. It was there, in honest moments, when all the action was between the twenties, that we'd admit that we'd never allow our little princes to play the games we're watching. We've read the stories and seen the studies. The headlines are only to going to get worse.

The next book, the one I will turn into ashes if I have to, is the one thing about sports that I wish I could forget. I had just returned to New York after a reporting trip to Darfur and woke up to a morning chat show celebrating the 90-pound MVP edition of the Super Bowl XL Opus. The fawning and the $40,000 price tag sizzled my circuits. The bellowing inhumanity of a genocide couldn't grab attention in America, but there was still plenty of interest in our country's most overhyped event.

What Opus represents still chars me: The book is a reminder that as a society we're happy to blow wads of cash on the opiate of spectator sports. Right here in Atlanta, the Falcons have flown ahead of first graders as the municipal machinery rushes to replace the downtown sports palace. It's hard to watch.

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So what is life without spectator sports? A life devoid of easy camaraderie? No. I've talked a couple friends into reading Let the Great World Spin and Freedom. Thanks to Rex Ryan, Patty was referenced more than Tebow this season.

Honestly, it's easier to talk to someone without a game to distract conversation. It's not "My Dinner With Andre," but it's nice to talk about life and books with sudden explosions of indignation (including my own) over a blown call.

And the book I'm reading? Accustomed to waking with Hook'em.com on my phone, I now tap iBooks and read a bit of Infinite Jest. Even still, it's impossible to get away from the NFL. So, IJ is like Nicorette. I knew David Foster Wallace used a tennis academy as a backdrop, but I had no idea one of the early vignettes involved an Arizona Cardinal punter dressed like the tiny-cheeping-bird version of a cardinal 'snow-plowing' through the air from the top of a Mile-High stadium down to the field. Bonus or no he refuses to whistle or squawk. When football introductions take that turn I'll be sure to return to watching.

So Super Bowl Sunday is upon us. The Falcons were four points short so I don't have to watch out of civic duty. Luckily, Atlanta lives up to it's reputation as a town with a disappointing fan base. In this city it's easy to turn off the sports noise.

So what will I do as America gathers around their plasma screens? I'll join the early side of the Super-Genius Football Club finale for bit and then take part in a better pastime: A three-year-old's bedtime routine. The TV will stay off after he's out: Rather than cheer for a game-tying off-tackle twenty-yarder, I'm going to try to pick up my book and try to find something as good as this:

It's raining, sort of, the air pilled with a dangling, brokedick mizzle into which umbrellas are constantly being raised and lowered, up, down, up, down, like a leisurely game of whack-a-mole.

Brokedick mizzle. Thanks for that phrase Ben Fountain. That's worthier of our admiration than any weak-side blitz. Poetry on the field is hyperbolic. On the page it isn't.

In the end, Scrooge does have a soft spot: I haven't gone cold, cold turkey. I still have my hometown Spurs. Cue the Harry Chapin: I've shared the team with my father for 25 years. So we will go to a game when I'm back in March. It's my family's version of the Maclean's trout-fishing. I will wish the sound system was dulled, not deafening, and that we could skip the pre-and-post game radio shows in the car. My dad just read some Lee Child and I'd like to discuss it.

Naka Nathaniel teaches journalism at Emory University. He worked for The New York Times from 1995 to 2008.